LONDON 



BY 



/V:r CHESTERTON 



Privately Printed 

Minneapolis 

1914 



Copyright 1914 

by 

E. D. Brooks 



JAN -4 1915 

)CI.A391444 






LONDON 



■ ■ ■ 



There is an old London story that has never 
lost its loveliness for me. It was about a stout old 
lady from the country, who travelled round and 
round the Underground Railway in a circle, be- 
cause at each station she tried to get out back- 
wards, and at each station the guard pitched her 
in again, under the impression that she was try- 
ing to get in. It is a beautiful story ; doing honour 
alike to the patience of the female sex and the 
prompt courtesy of the male ; it is a song without 
words. But there. is another and milder version 
(perhaps we might dare to say a more probable 
version) of the same story. It describes an aged 
farmer and his daughter travelling the same sad 
circle, and failing to alight anywhere, partly be- 
cause of the impedimenta of country parcels, but 
partly also because they were almost satisfied with 
the staring names of the places set up on the Un- 
derground Railway. They thought the "Mansion 
House" was rather a dark place for the Lord 
Mayor to live in. They could detect no bridge 
through the twilight of "Westminister Bridge" nor 
any promising park in "St. James' Park Station." 
They could only suppose that they were in the 
crypts of "The Temple," or buried under the foun- 



dations of "The Tower/' 

Nevertheless, I am not quite so certain that this 
cockney tale against countrymen scores so much as 
is supposed. The rustic saw the names at least; 
and nine times out of ten the names are nobler 
than the things. Let us suppose him as starting 
westward from the Mansion House where he com- 
miserated the dim captivity of the Lord Mayor. 
He would come to another equally gloomy vault in 
which he would read the word Blackfriars. It is 
not a specially cheery word ; but it goes back I 
imagine to that great movement, at once dogmatic 
and democratic, which gave to its followers the 
fierce and fine name of the Dogs of God. But at 
the worst, the mere name of Blackfriars Station is 
more dignified than the Blackfriars Road. He 
would pass on to the Temple ; and surely the mere 
word 'Temple'' is more essential and eternal than 
either the rich lawyers in its courts, or the poor 
vagabonds on its Embankment. He will go on to 
Charing Cross, where the noblest of English 
knights and kings set up a cross to his dead queen. 
But unless his rustic erudition informs him of the 
fact, he will gain little by getting out of the train, 
and going to the larger station. Neither porters 
carrying luggage nor trippers carrying babies 
will encourage any conversation about the orig- 
inal sacredness of the spot. He will stop next at 
a yet more sacred spot, the station called West- 



minister Bridge, from which he can visit, as Ma- 
caulay says *'the place where five generations of 
statesmen have striven and the place where they 
sleep together." By walking across the street 
from this station he can enter the House of Com- 
mons. But, if he is wise, he will stop in the train. 
He will then arrive at St. James' Park; and (as 
Mr. Max Beerbohm has truly remarked) he will 
not meet St. James there. 

Yet these mere names that he has seen on a 
dingy wall like advertisements are really the foun- 
dation stones of London ; and it is right that they 
should as it were, be underground. The mere fact 
that these five names in a row along the river-side 
all bear witness to, an ancient religion, would tell 
the rustic in the railway train (supposing him to 
be of elaborate culture and lightning deduction) 
the great part of the history of London. The old 
Temple Church still stands, full of the tombs of 
those great and doubtful heroes who signed them- 
selves with the sign of Christ, but who came, 
rightly or wrongly, to be stamped by their neigh- 
bours with the seal of Antichrist. The old Charing 
Cross is gone ; but its very absence is as much of a 
historical monument as itself. For the Puritans 
pulled it down merely for being a cross; though 
(as it says in a humorous song of the period) 
Charing Cross had always refrained from utter- 
ing a word against the authority of the Parlia- 



ment. But these old things, though fundamental, 
are fragmentary : and whether as ruins or merely 
as records, will tell the stranger little of what Lon- 
don has been and is, as distinct from Paris or Ber- 
lin or Chicago. London is a mediaeval town, as 
these names testify; but its soul has been sunk 
deeper under other things than any other town that 
remembers mediaevalism at all. It is very hard in- 
deed to find London in London. 

There is a story (one among many) that there 
was a settlement before the Romans came which 
occupied about the same space that is now occupied 
by Cannon Street Station. In any case it is prob- 
able that the seed of the city was sown somewhere 
about that slope of the river-side. The Romans 
made it a great town but hardly their greatest 
town, and the barbarism of the Ninth Century left 
it bare. Its second or third foundation as a pre- 
dominant city belongs, like many such things, to 
the genius and tenacity of Alfred. He did not in- 
deed hold it as a capital of England, but rather as 
an outpost of Wessex. From his point of view Lon- 
don was a suburb of Wantage. But he saw the 
practical importance of its position towards the 
river mouth; and he held it tight. The Norman 
Conquest clinched the condition; which was 
roughly symbolised by the Tower of London, which 
for many centuries was a trophy captured and re- 
captured by opposite factions. But. in the main, 



London had one political character from first to 
last. It was always, for good or evil, on the side 
of the Parliament and against the King. Six hun- 
dred years ago, it was the citizens of London who 
had to stand the charge of the strongest of the 
Plantagenets in his youth on the downs round 
Lewes. Four hundred years afterwards it was the 
citizens of London who held the high places of 
Buckinghamshire when the army of Charles L 
threatened London from Oxford. Later still the 
Londoners stood solidly against James II and 
splendidly against George III. Whether Parlia- 
ment was worth such fidelity, whether the mer- 
chants of the Thames were wise to tie themselves 
so entirely to the grandees of the counties, is no 
subject for this place. But that the tradition of 
the town was sincere and continuous cannot be 
doubted. To this day the Lord Mayor of London 
is probably proud that the King of England can 
only enter London by his leave. That fact is as 
close a summary of the purely political history of 
London as one could want. It exactly expresses 
the victory of the merchants over the central 
power. It is often observed that the French think 
the Lord Mayor of London more important than 
the King. They are an acute people. 

This rather surly love of liberty (or rather of 
independence) is written in the straggling map of 
London and proclaimed in its patchwork architec- 



ture. There is in it something that every Eng- 
lish man feels in himself, though he does not al- 
ways feel it to be good; something of the amateur; 
something of the eccentric. The nearest phrase 
is the negative one of "unofficial." London is so 
English that it can hardly be called even the cap- 
ital of England. It is not even the county town 
of the county in which it stands. That title, I be- 
lieve, belongs to Brentford; which legend credits 
with two kings at once, like Lacedaemon. It is 
just London. As his French friend said about 
Browning, its centre is not in the middle. The Par- 
liament sits in London but not in the City of Lon- 
don ; the City of London is not under the London 
County Council; and in spite of the opinion of 
General Choke, the Sovereign does not live in the 
Tower. Crowded and noisy as it is, there is some- 
thing shy about London; it is full of secrets and 
anomalies ; and it does not like to be asked what it 
is for. In this there is not a little of its history 
as a sort of half -rebel through so many centuries. 
Hence it is a city of side-streets that only lead into 
side streets ; a city of short cuts — that take a long 
time. There have been recent changes in the other 
direction of course; but the very name of one of 
them unintentionally illustrates something not na- 
tive to the place. A more broad and sweeping 
thoroughfare in the continental manner, was 
opened between the Strand and Holborn; and 



called Kingsway. The phrase will serve for a 
symbol. Through all those creative and char- 
acteristic epochs, there was no King's Way through 
London. There was nothing Napoleonic ; no roads 
that could be properly decorated with his victories 
or properly cleared with his cannon. It had some- 
thing of the licence and privilege of that Alsatia 
that was its sore ; the little impenetrable kingdom 
of rascals that revelled down in Whitefriars, 
where now rascals of a more mournful kind write 
Imperialist newspapers. One might call mediae- 
val London a rabbit warren ; save that the Train- 
bands who took their pikes and 'prentices who 
caught up their clubs at a bell or a beacon were 
certainly anything but rabbits. 

I have said that this eccentricity, amounting to 
secrecy, remains in the very building of London. 
Some of the finest glimpses of it are got as if 
through the crack of a door. Our fathers gained 
freedom of vision through the gap in a fence ; just 
as they often gained freedom of speech through 
a flaw in an Act of Parliament. In their glorious 
visions of height or distance there is always some- 
thing of the keyhole ; just as in their glorious fights 
for law or liberty there was always something of 
the quibble. There is no finer effect than St. 
Paul's from the foot of its hill in delicate and na- 
tive weather; for the English climate (I may re- 
mark) is the finest in the world. I assume, of 



course, that the spectator is a serious mystic (that 
is, a materialist also) and appreciates the bodily 
beauty of heights, which should always be seen 
from below. The Devil takes us to the top of an 
exceeding high mountain, and makes us dizzy ; but 
God lets us look at the mountain. Yet this moun- 
tain made by man can only be seen in London by 
"sighting," by getting it between two houses, as 
a pilot steers between two rocks. Get the sighting 
wrong and you will see only a public house, or 
(what is much worse) a shop full of newspapers. 
Had either a French or a Prussian temple com- 
manded such an eminence, the whole hill would 
have been swept bare as with a sabre and studded 
with statues and gardens, that it might be seen 
from afar. Only I should not like it so much. But 
then I was born in London. 



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